[inglor_cz]

This analogy does not seem to be very strong. No one is making any progress on time travel, which may well be totally physically impossible.

On the other hand, our knowledge of mechanisms of aging has been growing fairly rapidly in the last decade or so, and if history is any teacher, such a growing heap of discoveries usually produces some concrete applications sooner or later.

We can already rejuvenate individual cells and smaller samples of tissues in vitro. That is not yet a recipe for a functional treatment of a living organism, but it is a (necessary) step in that direction.

There is also Sima the rat, breaking the longevity record for Sprague-Dawley rats by living for 1464 days after Katcher's treatment. Out of 8 subjects total.

Could be a random occurence, but the chances to break the longevity record in just eight rats are very, very low. And if it wasn't a random occurence, we already saw a meaningful life extension in an ordinary mammal.

[ImPostingOnHN]

The study takes all the advancements you mention into account, and says that even with that rate of progression, the specified life extension target (100y) is unlikely. Just like perpetual motion or time travel.

On the other hand, people have been claiming "breakthroughs" in all 3, so if that is what you want to hope for, that's cool. It just doesn't factor into our forecasts for any of the 3.

[inglor_cz]

"takes all the advancements you mention into account"

And I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific. There is no way you can extrapolate from basic experiments like Katcher's to the year 2080.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific.

Well, the study is literal science from a scientific institution, compared to an internet comment so... It wins here.

[inglor_cz]

It does not. There is a lot of useless papers produced because of the "publish or perish" pressure, and even harder sciences have a massive reproduction crisis.

Feynman diagnosed this sort of cosplay as "cargo-cult science" decades ago.

[ImPostingOnHN]

There are a greater number of useless internet posts produced within the same period, and the `useless/total` ratio is higher for internet posts than for scientific papers.